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Computers & Business Machines

Imagine the loss, 100 years from now, if museums hadn't begun preserving the artifacts of the computer age. The last few decades offer proof positive of why museums must collect continuously—to document technological and social transformations already underway.

The Museum's collections contain mainframes, minicomputers, microcomputers, and handheld devices. A Cray2 supercomputer is part of the collections, along with one of the towers of IBM's Deep Blue, the computer that defeated reigning champion Garry Kasparov in a chess match in 1997. Other artifacts range from personal computers to ENIAC, the Altair, and the Osborne 1. Computer components and peripherals, games, software, manuals, and other documents are part of the collections. Some of the instruments of business include adding machines, calculators, typewriters, dictating machines, fax machines, cash registers, and photocopiers

Not long after Intel introduced its 8080 chip, a small firm in Albuquerque, New Mexico, named MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) announced a computer kit called the Altair, which met the social as well as technical requirements for a small personal computer. MITS succeeded where other, more established firms had failed, and it was their machine that inaugurated the personal computer age. MITS got its start in computing in 1971, when it introduced an electronic calculator kit. Several thousand sold before 1974, when the sharp reduction in calculator prices drove the company out of that market.

H. Edward Roberts, the Florida-born former U.S. Air Force officer who headed MITS, decided to design a small, affordable computer around the Intel 8080. His daughter named the new machine after the star Altair. It was the first microcomputer to sell in large numbers. In January 1975, a photograph of the Altair appeared on the cover of the magazine Popular Electronics. The caption read "World's First Minicomptuer Kit to Rival Commercial Models." According to the magazine, the machine sold as a kit for $395, and assembled for $498. Roberts had hoped to break even by selling 200 Altairs. Within three months he had a backlog of 4,000 orders.

The kit offered by MITS represented the minimum configuration of circuits that one could legitimately call a computer. It had little internal and no external memory, no printer, and no keyboard or other input device. An Altair fitted out with those items might cost $4,000—the equivalent to the cheapest PDP-8 minicomputer, a reliable and established performer. Most purchasers found the kit was difficult to assemble, unless they had experience with digital electronics and a workbench fitted out with sophisticated test equipment. And even if one assembled the kit correctly it was sometimes difficult to get the Altair to operate reliably. Gift of Forrest M. Mims III

Jack Kilby’s demonstration of the first working integrated circuit (IC) in 1958 revolutionized the field of microelectronics. Instead of using discrete transistors, resistors, and capacitors to form a circuit, Kilby’s IC design integrated a transistor, a capacitor, and the equivalent of three resistors all on the same chip. Kilby fabricated three types of circuits to test his idea: a flip flop, a multi vibrator and a phase shift oscillator. This chip is the phase-shift oscillator.

The first IC was made out of a thin slice of germanium (the light blue rectangle) as a bulk resistor and contained a single bipolar transistor (under the large aluminum bar in the center). It had four input/output terminals (the small vertical aluminum bars), a ground (the large bar on the far right), and wires of gold. The microchips of today have been improved by hundreds of innovations, but Kilby’s prototype was an important early step.

This Electromatic brand typewriter was manufactured by the International Business Machines Corporation beginning in 1935. The Electromatic typewriter was first manufactured in 1924 by the North East Electric Company. The North East Electric Company produced the motor and base, and used a Remington model 12 as the typewriter. The North East Electric Company became the Electromatic Typewriter Company before being purchased by IBM in 1933. In 1935 IBM produced the Electromatic Model 01 for the first time. The Electromatic operated with a motor controlling all aspects of typing, from the type bar to the carriage returns, allowing the user to operate the typewriter without their fingers ever leaving the keyboard.

This control panel is a small part of a very large programmable calculator built by Bell Telephone Laboratories of New York for the U.S. Army. By the mid-twentieth century, improving communications required complicated calculations. In order to improve the clarity and range of long distance voice signals, George Stibitz, a research mathematician at Bell Labs, needed to do calculations using complex numbers. Stibitz and Bell Labs engineer Sam Williams completed a machine for this purpose in 1939–it later was called the Bell Labs Model I. With the outbreak of World War II, Stibitz and Bell Labs turned their attention to calculations related to the aiming and firing of antiaircraft guns. Stibitz proposed a new series of relay calculators that could be programmed by paper tape to do more than one kind of calculation. The BTL Model 5. was the result. The machine consisted of 27 standard telephone relay racks and assorted other equipment. It had over 9000 relays, a memory capacity of 30 7-digit decimal numbers, and took about a second to multiply 2 numbers together. Two copies of the machine were built. This one was used by the U.S. Army for ballistics work at Aberdeen, Maryland and then at Fort Bliss, Texas. Machines that used relays were reliable, but slower than those using vacuum tubes, and soon gave way to electronic computers.

This Remington Portable No. 1 typewriter was manufactured by the Remington Typewriter Company around 1923. The ivory body of the typewriter is different from many of the Remington portables of this period, and this typewriter may be the “deluxe” variant of the Remington portable No. 1. The manual typewriter was attached to a leather base, and came with a leather cover to create a carrying case for the portable typewriter.

When the TI-99/4a was introduced in 1981, Texas Instruments claimed it was both "a major breakthrough in computer technology," and, probably more important, the "lowest priced, 16-bit computer available." It cost only $525. The TI 99/4a was a redesign of the TI-99/4 system, which had been a market failure and was discontinued. The new machine sold well, but by August 1982, TI was falling behind its competitors, especially Commodore. So it began offering a $100 rebate on the TI-99/4a. It quickly became the best-selling home computer in America, controlling, by the end of 1982, approximately 35% of the market--150,000 machines a month.

In February 1983, TI cut the price to $150, and then in June 1983, it offered a plastic version of the TI-99/4a for less than $100. But now it had gone too far. It was selling computers for less than cost, resulting in a second quarter loss of $100 million.

The TI-99/4a operated on a TI TMS99000 at 3 MHz and included 16 KB of RAM and 26 KB of ROM. The computer included a RS-232 interface card and a 32K memory expansion card as well as a Data Storage cassette. Texas Instruments controlled the development of software for the machine and offered only around 300 titles. These did not include many of the most popular programs of the time.

Initially, the only way to expand the machine was to use a port on the right side of the console. Peripherals could extend out several feet. To remedy the situation TI released a more convenient Peripheral Expansion Box (PEB) and, surprisingly, sold 250,000 units at $1,475.00 each--far more than the cost of the computer.

Eventually Texas Instruments sold over 2.5 million units of the TI-99/4A. However the company decided that computers were not a promising business and dropped out of the PC market in 1984.

This section of the Daystrom 046 consists of the multiplexer, logic cabinets, and auxiliary memory. The 046 was manufactured by Daystrom's La Jolla division and was the company's first product utilizing transistors and core memory. Daystrom guaranteed a 99 percent availability, which was demonstrated at Louisiana Power & Light's Sterlington Plant. This 046 is the second purchased by Louisiana Power & Light. It was installed at the Little Gypsy Power Plant in 1961 in LaPlace, La., and was the first computer to control a power plant from startup to shutdown.

The Altair 680 appeared about a year after Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) had introduced the Altair 8800, which many historians credit as the beginning of the home computer industry. In the Altair 680, MITS offered an update of the Altair 8800 that was based on the Motorola 6800 processor.

Like the Altair 8800, the Altair 680 was a kit. For $293, users received circuit boards, capacitors, resistors, transistors, diodes, a power supply, an instruction manual, and a case in which to assemble it. Also like the 8800, the 680 had switches on the front that could be used to enter computer instructions, bit by bit. If customers were willing to pay $420, they could buy the computer already assembled. Neither the kit nor the assembled computer came with display, keyboard, or external storage device.

The Motorola 6800 microprocessor ran at 500 KHZ, and the computer had a 1 KB of RAM and 1 KB of ROM, as well as support for a serial terminal and punch reader.

The Altair 680 did not meet with the success that the 8800 had. Most users were now interested in buying computers that came with displays and keyboards, and were willing to pay more for them. The Altair 680 kit in the Smithsonian was never assembled.

This Remette brand typewriter was manufactured by the Remington Rand Corporation from the late 1930s until the early 1940s. The Remette was a portable typewriter that came in a black leather carrying case. The Remette has a full size “QWERTY” keyboard, with the type bars visible in semi-circle above the brand name “Remette.”

This is an Electromatic brand electric typewriter. The Electromatic typewriter was first manufactured in 1924 by the North East Electric Company. The North East Electric Company produced the motor and base, and used a Remington model 12 as the typewriter. The North East Electric Company became the Electromatic Typewriter Company before being purchased by IBM in 1933. The Electromatic operated with a motor controlling all aspects of typing, from the type bar to the carriage returns, allowing the user to operate the typewriter without their fingers ever leaving the keyboard. This typewriter was once used by the United States Navy.